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Dethroning the Gods of the Religions, p. 3 It
should be noted at once that the Gods of the religions - including the
ancestral and tribal Gods - represent or demonstrate in general, not
omniscience as they typically claim for themselves - but the average
of the humanity that they control, both in terms of intelligence and
character. This observation holds the key to uncovering their real identity.
Their existence arises out of a collective psychological condition of
dependency and fear which presupposes the mind-body split - and their
characteristics are precisely limited by the qualities inherent in this
milieu. The
causal mechanism by which such quasi-entities arise will be examined
in detail below, but to properly understand the phenomenology of this
process the following key principle must always be borne in mind. At
the very moment that man’s primordial link to consciousness itself
and to the life-current of the universe becomes severed, the mass mind
is formed and arises. This causal relationship is direct. The Gods of
the religions are a special class of psychic entity that arise solely
in relation to and in the context of the mass mind; they never arise
to an individual that has realized its immediate link to reality. Such
entities are a unique and invariable characteristic that is inseparable
from the conditions associated with the specific structure of mass psychology.
These two forms of consciousness, the collectivist and that of the realized,
self-originated individual, are precisely the basis for the distinction
between the solar and lunar religions that has been developed elsewhere
[6]. According
to the theories of modern western psychology the mind is merely an effect
or an epiphenomenon of biology or of matter; it does not arise in the
context of an environment that is continuous with its own order of reality,
that is to say, a cosmic meta-domain of mind exactly as the body arises
in the contextual domain of the physical world. Consequently the traditional
conception of God is regarded by this psychology as merely a projection
of man’s fear’s and hopes and is reducible to them. However,
from the standpoint of a non-reductionist perspective in which the physical
world is a dimension within the cosmic meta-domain of the psyche things
appear otherwise. While the genesis of the religious Gods does require
a mass psychology of dependency they are not merely subjective hallucinations.
They arise as symbiotic dimensional entities that have no independent
existence from the psychic energy of the collectivity from which they
draw their power. The relationship between such Gods and the groups
in which and on which they live is not merely parasitic, it is reciprocal
and hence symbiotic. Because such Gods are inserted in a subtle dimension
of the world-process that is in reality psychophysical in nature they
are associated with or can acquire influence over certain of the elemental
forces of the natural world and bring about real effects of a purely
external order on behalf of their votaries. Having
defined the class of entities to which the religious Gods belong we
can now examine their genesis and the functional mechanisms by which
they operate which we will illustrate with examples drawn from the so-called
Semitic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In
the Cosmic Origins of Species it was shown that existence has
no contrary and therefore no cause: nonexistence does not exist otherwise
it would be something and therefore cannot antecede or have caused existence.
Likewise consciousness is always the case, it cannot be derived from
what is not conscious; therefore it is uncaused and unoriginated. Finally
Life is energy, therefore radiation. It follows that manifest Life must
always be the case since non-manifestation is not a possibility of what
is by its very nature radiant. Therefore, existence as such always and
everywhere exists in eternal duration, it has no beginning and no end
and in this respect we agree with Aristotle. There is no Creator of
the universe or of any universe. All universes are macrobeings that
reproduce themselves in generations exactly as all living being reproduce
themselves in generations. Every universe contains the seeds of succeeding
universes and reproduce themselves in endless beginningless duration.
In
the face of this evidence the Gods of the religions invariably claim
to be the omnipotent creators, maintainers and destroyers of the universe
and of man. This claim is false: no God created the universe and claims
of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence and the like by religious
Gods can be rigorously shown to be superstitious nonsense on the basis
of both logical and empirical evidence. Throughout the course of human
history thousands of Gods have claimed to be the creator of the universe
by means of an enormous variety of mechanisms; all of these divergent
claims cannot be true because none of them is true. In
order to project its absoluteness and omnipotence and thereby gain the
total allegiance and unconditional subservience of its devotees, every
God must make time and space begin with itself and claim to be in control
of every force and particle in the universe. A mere glance at the history
of the world in general and of the religions in particular- given their
reciprocal ostracisms, their internal contradictions and the strictly
limited scope of their influence and expansion - renders such claims
obvious nonsense. The proposition of a transcendent unity of religions
- of a single source of their emanation - entertained by certain metaphysical
systems is not supported by any facts. Religious sectarianism has directly
or indirectly been the single greatest cause of bigotry, murder, treachery,
narrowness, stupidity and deception far exceeding every other cause
in the history of man. On
the contrary what is clear is that the Gods exhibit both the best and
the worst characteristics of every human collectivity attached to them.
This is necessarily the case since they are symbiotic entities which,
through the worship and ritual acts of its votaries, progressively accumulate
power by absorbing the psychic constituents of its worshipers both while
alive and after death. Therefore the demonstrated qualities of the Gods
of the religions are entirely human, both in their weaknesses and in
their strengths and give evidence of a level of intelligence that hardly
ever surpasses the average of the collectivity in question. |
